Hugh Bailey: No such thing as full protection

Published 5:08 pm, Friday, January 18, 2013

When I was in school, we had something called gym class.

Weather permitting, 20 or 30 of us would go outside for an hour or so and run on the track or kick a soccer ball around.

We also had organized, school-sponsored outdoor sporting events. Then there were field trips, where we'd trek off to, say, the Bronx Zoo or, more likely, something across town, with busloads of students herded from place to place.

I'm guessing similar stuff happens at today's schools.

Students, ideally, don't spend every minute of the day in a classroom. They aren't meant to be prisons. Morning arrival and afternoon departure are chaotic by nature.

Schools have multiple entrances. Most of them have ground-level classrooms.

The idea, then, that anything short of a squad of armed guards, with barbed wire and watch towers surrounding the grounds, at every school in America could offer legitimate protection from the next inevitable rampage doesn't hold up. At best, an armed police presence provides a sense of security, but little else.

Which is not to say it can't be part of a solution -- it's one of the few areas of common ground between the president and the NRA. But to pretend this is a valid solution by itself is wrong.

The good news, such as it is, is that no one on any side in the current debate pretends that there is any one answer. Even the NRA, for all the crudity of its arguments, says it'll take more than simply dumping more guns into the world (though that's always high on the priority list).

It's a matter of emphasis.

Three days before Sandy Hook, in an incident that somehow passes as run-of-the-mill these days, a man shot up an Oregon mall before killing himself. In the midst of his rampage, he was apparently confronted by a man with a legally permitted concealed weapon, who pointed it at the shooter but did not pull the trigger.

Here we have an example of the legendary "good guy with a gun" taking on the bad guy. The "good guy" may have inspired the gunman to flee the scene and then kill himself. This is taken as the gold standard -- one person with a gun who saved, rather than took, many people's lives.

Before the concealed weapon could be pulled, however, two people were killed, and a third was shot in the chest but survived. Considering the gunman reportedly fired dozens of bullets in a mall crowded with thousands of people, it was an incredible stroke of luck that more people weren't killed.

To a certain segment of our violence-drenched society, this counts as a success story.

The concealed-carrier in Oregon didn't shoot, he said, because there were bystanders in the area. Not every potential hero could be counted on to be as sensible. And first responders arriving on the scene would have no way of knowing the man with the gun wasn't the "bad guy" they were after.

Some will take the lesson to be that we need more of those concealed carriers lurking in our malls. Instead, we could try to find a way to keep weapons capable of killing dozens of people out of the hands of would-be killers in the first place.

Whether it's schools or malls, there is no full protection. That's true anywhere in life. The best we can do is limit the potential for harm. That means doing everything we can to stop making it so easy for someone to kill so many in a short time.

That's what the proposals on the table in Washington and Hartford are about. Nothing else. If that constitutes an attack on "freedom," then that word has no meaning.